


Another Word for Skill

by tsurai



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Asian-American Character, Asian-American Naming Conventions, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Sole Survivor, Racism, Timeline What Timeline
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-10 22:19:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7863352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsurai/pseuds/tsurai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>His earliest memory was his mother’s soft hands on his shoulders and her strained whisper: “Remember, Anh, you must not tell anyone.”</i><br/>The Sole Survivor is psychic but that only serves to fuck everything up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to get a mental picture of my Sole, you can see him [here](http://tsuraiwrites.tumblr.com/post/151518801141/for-anyone-who-wanted-to-know-what-my-sole).

“To a soldier, luck is merely another word for skill.” – Patrick MacGill

* * *

Nathan Anh Vu was one man among many in a battalion of outcasts, but it’d been a long time since he’d heard anyone call him by his name outside official reports.

* * *

Soldiers in the 108th were a close-knit group, brought together by shared backgrounds, languages, and the knowledge the world was out to get them. That wasn’t strictly true, but what else were they supposed to think as a group of red-blooded Americans that all happened to share a few phenotypical features with the enemy? Some of the officers complained to the higher-ups, then were promptly saddled with a few shitty white kids to prove them wrong.

Nate spat in the snow, teeth chattering. Because, of course, segregation went the way of the Japanese internment camps. Just stick a pretty bow on it and nothing’s wrong! Never mind we get the most dangerous postings or that we’re the most underequipped and uninformed battalion on the whole goddamn western seaboard.

“Yo, Lucky!” A voice broke him from his thoughts. Nate looked up just in time to see Brown rounding the corner of the barracks. The black man’s teeth shone white in the light reflecting off the snow. “A little early for a smoke break, isn’t it?”

 _Okay_ , _so they’re not_ all _bitchy white kids_. He dropped his half-burned cigarette and scuffed it out. “Couldn’t sleep.”

That was enough to make Brown’s smile falter, but it didn’t completely wipe it away. “Too bad, man. You know we’ve got road-sweep today. Chang will have your balls if you’re not on-point.”

Nate groaned. Chang was a hellion of a woman; he’d picked up more Chinese curses from her than he’d ever learned back in the mandatory classes in Basic. “That’s the fucking _worst_. Where the hell’s aerial?”

“They’re flying in more from Cali tomorrow – that last strike wrecked most of the vertibirds in Juneau. Air Force around Anchorage isn’t doing much better. So yeah, ground patrols ‘til then.”

He looked away from Brown, out past the barbed-wire fence and patrolling sentry bots to mountains ringed in cloud cover. Dread coiled, sick and hot in the pit of his stomach.

Road patrol was bad enough, with all the frags and pulse mines popping up in the wake of regular skirmishes, but that wasn’t what had Nate worried. It was the nightmare from last night.

Blood on snow, the scent of burned flesh and lead. Morino’s scream as they fall and Knapp’s cursing as he fumbles, dropping his laser rifle when a bullet skids across his arm. And something about Harris…

“Lucky?”

Nate started out of his reverie again, Brown’s broad hand wrapped around his elbow. It was all he could do not to shake the man off, but the flicker of color at the edge of his eyeline distracted him. He turned to look, eyes trained just over Brown’s shoulder as the other continued to emit waves of soft pink light that mirrored the concern on his face.

“I’m fine, just need some coffee, I think.” The pink didn’t recede. “I’ll be fine.”

Brown rolled his eyes, but the color around him finally changed to his normal vibrant green. “You keep telling yourself that. Meanwhile, I’m gonna get some grub. Coming? Or are you gonna brood here until Chang comes to drag you by the hair?” he said, already turning away.

“Biến đi!” he said, unable to fight a small smile.

“You know I still can’t understand you, man!” Brown replied, laughing and radiating bright yellow joy as he disappeared around the corner. Noise started rising in the barracks.

Nate dropped the smile.

* * *

 

After the third time he saved someone from getting a leg blown off by a concealed frag, they started to call him their lucky charm.

Then Nate casually mentioned to Morino that some of the trucks hadn’t been checked over lately. Sure enough, one of the overworked maintenance crew came up to him later, thanking him for catching the slip. Coolant had been leaking through from the engine on one of the trucks, and there was a good chance that its fusion core would’ve overheated five minutes down the road, blowing everyone in and around it sky-high.

Then there was a firefight, one of many. But this time Harris, one of the newer recruits – less disciplined and angry at the world for being pressed into service for a country that hated the shape of his eyes – got reckless. It was a mess from start to finish. The Chinese practically had them cornered on a regular clearing run, bursting from behind ruined buildings that littered most of Fairbanks. Their cover was sparse and there weren’t enough stealth boys to go around.

Then Harris leapt from cover and the dread building at the back of Nate’s throat burst into full-blown horror.

He was up and over the concrete barrier before anyone else even heard the approaching aircraft, adrenaline pushing him just fast enough to reach Harris – he yanked at the boy’s collar, half-dragging and half-throwing him to the ground as soldiers on both sides began screaming for retreat amongst an ominous whistling.

The shells hit, and the force threw Nate on top of Harris so hard he couldn’t breathe for a long moment as the pain slammed into him, hot agony streaking all down the left side of his face and across his chest. His vision went sideways and wobbly. The pain and tears filled his eyes…eye, because he couldn’t feel- he couldn’t see anything on that side _and fuck he couldn’t see_! Ringing in his ears sent him reeling.

Harris shoved him off, rolling Nate over and suddenly there was blood on the boy’s hands but Nate couldn’t see where it came from. The boy was red in the face from yelling – screaming really – and behind him the silhouettes of VB-02s made another pass.

Nate started to laugh, soft and hysterical through the pain. The shells were American – **_our own fucking country_** _bombed us to get a small pocket of enemies. Fuck this shit_.

Black crept over what was left of his vision, but he let it take him. At least he’d done one thing right – if he hadn’t gotten to Harris, the boy would have taken debris through the neck, right leg, and stomach, bleeding out long before anyone with a stimpack could reach him.

It was worth it.

* * *

He was ordered to take months of physical therapy to restore the full range of motion to his left arm, then psychotherapy after he screamed at one of the nurses not to touch him. He didn’t tell them what he saw in her – the eye covered with bandages could see her colors all too clearly. The brown of rot and malice-black clinging to her; the dark-light impressions of pain and patients who received not-enough morphine or just a little too much.

_“Remember, Anh, you must never tell anyone.”_

They released him back to civilian life a month later, laden with gag orders, an eyepatch to cover his now-blind left eye, and a box full of medals.

As soon as he made it to the taxi he dropped the patch out the window. He’d dump the medals when he got home. _Let people stare_.

No one would ever accuse him of being “lucky” ever again.

* * *

He had nightmares for months before the bombs dropped. Nothing concrete – bone-rattling booms like trying to brace a minigun against his chest without power armor; roaring, the scent of grease as he held Nora’s hand and descended _down down down_ ; light, a splash of blood against frosted-over metal; and a barren plane against a dull green sky, empty and silent. More often than not he woke screaming just to fill the quiet, to hear Nora whisper, “Anh, baby, _shh_ , it’ll be okay.” And her use of that name quieted him, but never quite settled him to calm.

Between his dreams and Shaun’s colic, Nora got even less sleep than he did. And the guilt of it weighed on him, those centuries later – what _use_ was it, to see and know things he shouldn’t when it couldn’t even save the people he loved most?

He was shaking by the time he left the vault, Cryogun clutched in unsteady hands with knuckles still dripping blood, despite the way he’d wrapped them to punch out the display case’s glass.

Behind him, the pit screamed of cold and suffocation, of desperate need to escape and _deathdeathdeath_. The hollow in his chest echoed back his son’s name – just as desperately and with no small amount of dread.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone wondering what Nathan Anh Vu looks like, look no further.

The earth was scorched, but not barren like his dreams. The plants on the path back to Sanctuary Hills were small, stunted with hardly a glimmer of green to be seen – but undoubtedly alive, humming with barely-there energy when he passed.

“Mr. Nate!” Codsworth called, the first time they caught sight of each other. He flinched at the name (how long has it been since he last heard it?) but didn’t correct the robot. He didn’t know what to say, just that it felt wrong.

But everything felt wrong, so that was nothing new.

Two hundred years, he’d been sleeping. Well, two-hundred and ten, but who was counting when you passed all your time in deep-freeze? His left shoulder throbbed at the mere thought of the cold, and he clutched the Cryolator reflexively in his other hand.

Codsworth was…different. The way he acted – breaking down with a genuine distress he’d never seen in a Mr. Handy – was alarming, but that wasn’t what threw him off. No, it was the silver light that shimmered around the ‘bot, radiating a mere inch from the rusty metal exterior but bright and unmistakably there.

He’d never seen a robot with an aura. Codsworth certainly hadn’t had one before…well, before. And he couldn’t ask about it; he’d never talked to Codsworth about what he could see. Never even hinted about it to Nora…

He shied away from the thought of his wife, still sucker-punched by that final image of blood frozen against her skin.

As it stood, there was no one he could ask and nothing he could do about the weird light other than to shove it into a folder in the back of his mind labeled: ‘Shit to Think About Later’.

He searched the ruined houses looking first for signs of life, then for useful things like something to fill his grumbling stomach.

The giant-ass flies were a fucking surprise, to say the least. He didn’t get that good a look at them, too busy dodging their disgusting shots of _something_ while trying to get a round off with the 10mm he’d scrounged from the vault. Every bullet went wide. He hadn’t so much as touched a gun since leaving the hospital, and the colors he could see with his blind left eye did shit for his depth perception. _Fuck fuck I am so fucked what in the hell are these things-_

In the end it came down to Codsworth’s saw and flamethrower while the human took the opportunity to get the hell out of the confines of the dilapidated house.

“Are you all right, Mr. Nate?” the robot said when he exited, shaking green goo off his metal limbs. He could only nod in reply, saved from a verbal answer by a loud complaint from his stomach. “Oh, sir! Would you like me to rustle something up for you? There are a few wild mutfruit growing behind Mr. Parkinson’s house…or perhaps a stray box of Sugarbombs?”

 _Mute…fruit?_ He couldn’t bring himself to ask – it was probably exactly like it sounded, and between that and a two-hundred-year-old box of cereal he wasn’t sure what would be the better choice. “Anything you can find would be fine, Codsworth.”

-

Anything was apparently _not_ fine. He stared at the pile of purple fruit next to the tin of Cram, and tried not to be ill. Both foodstuffs radiated lines of sickly yellow-green light that he knew couldn’t be anything other than radiation, and there was _no way_ he was going to put that in his body. _Shit_ , _is everything here fucking irradiated? What the hell am I going to eat?_

“Is everything alright, Mr. Nate?”

“Ah, um…I’m suddenly not feeling that hungry,” he mumbled, looking up in time to see the apertures of Codsworth’s eyes dilate a bit, and was struck temporarily dumb when the faintest flicker of pink ghosted over the silver surrounding the Mr. Handy.

The color could only be concern. An actual emotion. From a robot. Before he could even process it, Codsworth was drifting off then back in a flash, offering an aluminum can of purified water, seal unbroken.

“At least drink something, sir. It’s important to stay hydrated!” The water, at least, showed no signs of radiation poisoning, so he took it from the robot’s claw with a grateful sigh. His stomach quieted its grumbling for the moment, but he knew it wouldn’t last. He needed to find other people, people who could point out non-irradiated food, who were alive and could reassure him that this whole thing wasn’t some fucked-up fever dream, who wouldn’t keep speaking to him like Nora was still alive and Shaun was just around the corner waiting to be picked up from day care.

He closed his eyes and rubbed at his face, tamping down the urge to start shouting expletives at the top of his lungs. Best case scenario, Codsworth would think he’d gone ‘round the twist. At worst, it could bring something a lot worse than a few oversized flies down on them. Sighing, he let his left eye drift open while the other stayed shut under the pressure of his hand. There was the predictable darkness, broken only by wisps of colored light – Codsworth’s silver glow, the dull greens of struggling vegetation, the poison yellow-green of the fruit near his hand. The sight was comforting in its normalcy: the colors against a stark black background. _At least one thing hasn’t changed._

He emptied the can, set it aside, and stood. There was no point in putting off the inevitable.

* * *

He’d always been more of a cat person, but the dog was a blessing. He nearly cried when it ran up to him, tail wagging and aura the bright yellow of uncomplicated happiness that had him offering his hand to sniff without a second thought.

Then the fucking naked mole-rat-things burst out of the ground and the Cryolator practically leapt to his hands. The rodents weren’t even that hard to fight, once he got over the heart-stopping fear enough to concentrate. Their auras were easy to pinpoint, threaded through with that yellow-green that made him nauseous to even look at. Everything in him screamed to run away, _don’t let those things touch you!_ He almost obeyed but the dog yelped, turning to wrench at the rat-thing biting its back leg and crushing the rodent’s skull in its jaws.

After that, well… he couldn’t leave the dog.

* * *

Concord looked like shit, but that wasn’t what threw him off the most. No, it was that the first honest-to-god human that he met after waking to the wasteland, he shot dead in under a minute. He caught sight of her head first, peeking out from the side of a building. He lifted his hand, about to call out to her (another human, _oh thank god_ ), but then she turned his way and caught his eye – face smudged with dirt and blood, jaw set in determination – she was the very picture of a survivor, someone he could respect, except…her aura. Even from this distance he could see the streamers of jagged black pulsing malevolence and a casual disregard for violence that made his heart stop (he was reminded of the nurse, her love for causing pain and the way he screamed _get away get away_ ). This woman was not evil – there was no such thing as far as he knew – but he also knew without a doubt that she would not hesitate to kill him; would bury a .308 between his eyes if he gave her enough time to aim the pistol she’d already started to raise.

The 10mm was in his hand already – he had no opportunity to grab the Cryolator, too heavy to raise in time – so he’d have to hope his lack of depth perception wasn’t about to spell the end of his life. He raised the gun and shot.

* * *

By the time he made it into the barricaded room, his shoulder was a mess of stabbing pain that warned him to stop moving it around or it would be agonizing when he went to bed. The strain of running and shooting and carting heavy guns everywhere was getting to him. He rolled the joint once more, testing, but winced and let the arm hang loose. The door opened before he could get to it, and he was grateful enough to not just toss the laser musket down – it was a piece-of-shit gun, but he’d kept on using it out of sheer stubbornness and a stifled desire to bring it back to the people who needed it more than he did.

“Man, I don’t know who you are but your timing’s impeccable. Preston Garvey, Commonwealth Minutemen.”

He set the musket up against the side of the door before finally looking up at the room’s dirty and careworn occupants. At the forefront stood a man in a rather impressive hat with a matching laser musket, holding out a hand to shake. Behind him was another man in overalls that looked like he’d just stepped out of a Red Rocket garage from two hundred years ago, but it was neither of them that caught his attention.

Rather, the light shining between their shoulders led his eye to an old woman hunched in one of the remaining half-rotten chairs, and her gaze caught his.

He’d met people like him, once or twice before. They could identify each other instantly by the illumination around their heads – the way the auras twisted and flashed like sunlight breaking through shattered crystal.

The old woman stood so quickly, everyone in the room paused at her shuddering breath and the cracking of her joints. “You, kid. Come here,” she demanded, and he obeyed without thinking, brushing past the two men – including Preston’s still-outstretched arm – and another guy curled on the floor to stand in front of her. She seized his empty hands, inspecting his palms before peering up at his eyes. He fought not to turn away as she lingered on the left side of his face, torn up and blind and blighted.

“I knew Dogmeat would bring us a good one, but even I didn’t See someone like you,” she said, voice raspy with age and exhaustion. She gazed just over his shoulder, looking at his colors the way he did to everyone else, and he was momentarily distracted with wondering what she saw. (The light, of course, but the pain? The unending cold he could still feel biting at his bones? The soul-sucking hole left by Shaun’s absence and the grief over Nora he kept pushing down, swearing to himself he’d deal with it later?)

“What’s your name, kid?” she asked, quiet and sad.

“Nathan-” he started, but she squeezed his hands again chastisingly.

“No, not that hogwash! No, I mean your _name_ ; the name your mother called you, what the woman in blue said to wake you on the nights the Sight got too bad.”

“How do you-” he started, but stopped. The answer was as obvious as the glass-fractures sparkling around her head. “Anh. My name is Anh Vu.”

* * *

The power armor was enough to take on Raiders, but that giant fucking lizard thing?

He shuddered, glad for the tremor of warning that had kept him on the roof instead of jumping down to deal with the Raiders head-on.

After this, there was no way anything the wasteland had to throw at him would ever surprise him again.

Lizard vanquished, he trooped back inside and down to the foyer. Preston smiled and thanked him, using his Vietnamese name. The man didn’t stare suspiciously at his scars or his face, didn’t seem to think there was anything more suspicious about the shape of his eyes and that was…

That was something.

* * *

Anh, still getting used to the name the settlers called openly across the street, ignored all urges to get out and go for a while. He ventured out only to collect the things the settlers needed – cogs and oil for Sturges to build turrets around the perimeter, steel and wood to patch walls and roofs, cloth from the boarded-up houses in Lexington for mattresses, and wild mutfruit to plant behind the Burgess’ old house. He still couldn’t touch the fruit without feeling sick, but since he was being asked to plant it and not eat it he did his best to endure.

Between its location at the center of Sanctuary and the workbenches someone had built, the pockmarked yellow house had become a communal center. He thought about Mr. Burgess, a fat and red-faced man long-retired from his cushy government job who always scowled at him and the dark-skinned Myqueesha down the street. If he was to see Anh, Preston, and the Longs making such casual use of his home he’d probably have a conniption. The thought alone was enough to make him smile.

In the meantime, he had his own project to keep himself occupied. He and Preston had enough fusion cells to divide between the Cryolator and two laser muskets, but everyone else had regular lead-shooters. He’d recoiled in horror upon enquiring and being told everyone was making use of scavenged bullets. Shooting a 10mm himself was one thing – Anh trusted his “sight” to give him a heads-up if something was about to malfunction – but all the other people using 200-year-old bullets that had a 50/50 chance of shooting what they aimed at versus exploding in their hands? No.

He could practically hear his drill sergeant from Basic screaming in real-time that someone would get their fool ass killed if they continued on like this. He spent an hour with a piece of scratch paper and a pencil painfully eking out everything he’d been taught about scrapping, cleaning, making, and maintaining bullets. The primers and even the casings could be salvaged, providing there wasn’t too much corrosion, and he could melt and re-forge the rounds themselves. Mostly, he worried about the gunpowder. Corroded casings could be replaced easily; he’d already scrounged several hundred from Lexington and Concord. Powder, however, wasn’t so easily replaceable. Any corroded casings were inevitably filled with spoiled powder – sticky and useless.

Thankfully gunpowder was, if not exactly easy to mix up, at least a recipe that’d been pounded into his head so often it may as well have been engraved in stone. “What if” had been the sergeant’s favorite game, and he’d had the whole troop of privates memorizing responses for every Worst-Case-Scenario™ under the sun.

The first step was the hardest – potassium nitrate wasn’t exactly difficult to acquire if one knew where to look, but in the Commonwealth wasteland even stepping outside the boundaries of Sanctuary was a challenge. To find the ingredient he was looking for in caves infested with molerats and feral ghouls, even more so.

Preston perked up when he saw Anh by the early-morning cook fire getting ready to leave, lacing his boots with a pack full of empty bottles and canisters beside him.

“Hey man, finally heading out to Diamond City?” Maybe he was imagining the emphasis on _finally_ , but Anh ignored it all the same. Everyone knew about the situation with his son by now, and there was no way he could explain to anyone except perhaps Mama Murphy why he wasn’t out looking, or why he hadn’t left a month ago when he finished building the necessities with Sturges.

On one hand, the tug in his gut told him he _must_ find Shaun – his and Nora’s precious baby – and that it’d already been who _knows_ how long and he can’t fathom what they’ve done to him in that time.

On the other, that voice in the back of his head that sounded far too much like his mother whispered urgently – of caution, of monsters wrapped in sterile white – and told him that no matter how much loss he felt or how bad this new world seemed, it would all get infinitely worse the moment he found Shaun.

The dichotomy was enough to make him ill, on top of the weakness he already felt these days for not getting enough to eat. For now he could only choose caution, but he knew that someday soon he would have to follow the tugs.

He stood. “Not yet. I’m off to harvest some potassium nitrate…uh, saltpeter. For gunpowder,” he elaborated in response to Preston’s faint frown. He jiggled his bag demonstratively.

“Oh, okay.” The frown didn’t go away. “Do you need any help?”

“Nah, I’m good. I’ll be back by sundown.” Anh slung the pack over his shoulder, not quite able to meet Preston’s gaze. Dogmeat didn’t wait for his whistle, scrambling off the ground to trot after him, obviously unwilling to be left behind. He gave the dog a quick scratch behind the ears before setting off toward Red Rocket Station, mind purposefully blank.

If he took comfort in the tugs that signaled Shaun wasn’t dead, that there was still someone out there to find even as he ignored the urges, that was his prerogative.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, if anyone has any suggestions on encounters before (or even after) my plot starts veering wildly off-game, feel free to comment here or send me a message [on my tumblr](http://tsuraiwrites.tumblr.com/).

**Author's Note:**

> Vietnamese: “Biến đi!” = "Fuck off!"
> 
> Looking to get updates on fic status or ask questions? [Follow me on tumblr](http://tsuraiwrites.tumblr.com/).


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